A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."

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Archive of Wolff Materials

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

In October, 1973, after Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliott Richardson to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox because he had subpoenaed the Oval Office tapes, Richardson resigned. When Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus also resigned rather than obey Nixon's order, Nixon ordered Solicitor General Robert Bork, then acting head of the Justice Department, to fire Cox, and Bork did so, to his eternal shame. The firing of Acting Attorney General Sally Yates is not comparable, in many ways, most notably because she is a hold-over from the Obama Administration, on her way out anyway. Nixon was in his second term and all of the players in that affair were his appointees. Nevertheless, the sequence of events yesterday is genuinely frightening, not least precisely because Trump is a newly inaugurated President clearly being guided by, if not under the thumb of, a White Nationalist fascist with openly expressed desires to seize control of the American government.I have no idea how this is going to play out, but let me reiterate and expand on the observation I made yesterday, this time without cute allusions to a footnote in a book one hundred and fifty years old. The power of the President [or of any other figure in a modern government, democratic or otherwise] consists at bottom in his or her ability to get large number of other people to do what he or she says. We are so accustomed to regular, predictable obedience that we unthinkingly suppose that it is a property of the office, inseparable from that office. Whether it is a policeman directing traffic or a group of legislators passing a law or a military commander ordering troops or a court issuing a stay of a presidential directive, we take it for granted that the order will be obeyed. We talk about the "powers of the presidency" or the "powers of the Supreme Court" or even the power of a bureaucrat in an office to stamp a passport or approve a zoning variance, as though the mere occupancy of the position automatically conferrs the power to compel compliance.What happens, then, when a President issues a directive, a court orders a stay, and the President simply ignores the stay? One possibility is that the men and women actually carrying out the directive in airports and elsewhere ignore the court order and continue doing what the President has said, even though that is a violation of the rules supposedly governing our nation. This in turn might lead to massive popular protests at airports, say in New York City, interfering with the ability of the immigration officials at the airports to carry out the President's directive. This might stop the President from doing what he has announced that he intends to do. But it might also lead the President to order Governor Cuomo to call out the New York National Guard to disperse the crowds, using all force necessary. Governor Cuomo might order the New York National Guard, of which he is the commander, to stand down. President Trump might then order the New York National Guard federalized, and Cuomo might countermand that order. And so forth. It all comes down to the same question: Will the people with the weaponry and physical capacity to enforce the President's commands obey him, or side with Governor Cuomo and the demonstrators?I am not kidding, folks, this is what we could be looking at, and I genuinely do not know how it come out. That is why I describe it as frightening.

Monday, January 30, 2017

The decision of Obama to issue a careful, restrained statement of support for the airport protests is MAJOR NEWS. Don't kid yourselves. For a former president, nine days after stepping down, to say anything at all critical of his successor, no matter how oblique, is an unheard of development. There is simply no one better situated to rally the troops. I am beginning to think we may win [where winning means getting rid of Trump and living with the despicable Pence, just so we are clear.]

After writing and posting my comment for today, I read what
my son, Professor Tobias Barrington Wolff of the University of Pennsylvania Law
School, had to say on FaceBook. I reproduce
it here. I am pleased to see that
basically I guessed right, but Tobias really knows.

“The reports of DHS employees not fully complying with
federal court orders suspending parts of the anti-Muslim order are very
troubling. I do not yet have enough information to be calling that fact, alone,
a crisis. Compliance with court orders is sometimes slow or inadequate. It is a
serious problem when it happens and will sometimes warrant contempt
proceedings, but it is not by itself a crisis. If the government outright
defies these orders and proclaims itself not bound by the command of a federal
court, that will be a crisis.

More concerning to me -- and a step in the direction of
outright defiance -- is what appears to be the willful misrepresentation coming
from the White House about the content and effect of those court orders. I have
read several of those orders, and they are very clear. They are prohibiting the
administration from enforcing their cruel Executive Order through detention or
deportation against people who have already reached the United States (and in
some cases they operate more broadly than that). The White House is repeatedly
mischaracterizing the orders, saying that they have no effect on the EO and
that this ugly program remains in full effect. That is flatly untrue. As one
point of reference, here is the language from the order issued by the federal
district court in Massachusetts. It commands that the government:

"a) shall limit secondary screening to comply with the
regulations and statutes in effect prior to the Executive Order, including 8
U.S.C. § 1101(a)(13)(C);

"b) shall not, by any manner or means, detain or remove
individuals with refugee applications approved by U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services as part of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, holders of
valid immigrant and non-immigrant visas, lawful permanent residents, and other
individuals from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen who, absent
the Executive Order, would be legally authorized to enter the United States;

"c) to assure compliance with this Order, the United
States Marshal for the District of Massachusetts shall be served with this
Order and is further directed to take those actions deemed necessary to enforce
this Order; and

"d) Customs and Border Protection shall notify airlines
that have flights arriving at Logan Airport of this Order and the fact that
individuals on these flights will not be detained or returned based solely on
the basis of the Executive Order."

This is very clear. And, as has become their regular modus
operandi, the White House is trying to sow chaos and confusion by putting out
false information about the contents of the order, presumably counting on the
fact that almost no one will read the order for themselves but instead will
rely on news coverage that is presented in he-said-she-said form.

Also, Russell Halley reminds me that we need always to
consider the limits on the information that the man who currently occupies the
presidency is getting. I think it is a certainty that he has not read these
orders himself. It is quite possible that he is being given incomplete or
inaccurate information by his advisors about what those orders contain. And --
as I should have realized when I began this post -- he probably gets more information
from watching administration officials appear on FOX News than from direct
channels, given reports of his isolation and TV-watching. These
misrepresentations being made by White House officials may have the current
occupant of the presidency as their primary audience.”

We philosophers strive to understand the universe under the aspect of eternity, sub specie aeternitatis, but I find myself now in the midst of a whirlwind, and the training of a lifetime is of little help in grasping the significance of the events that flash before my eyes. We are now barely ten days into the Trump presidency. It is impossible for me to foresee what a second week will bring, let alone a month, or even, God forbid, a year. Let me comment briefly on two quite disparate phenomena.First, we are all transfixed by the reaction to Trump's ill-considered, poorly drafted immigration order, an order almost certainly thrust upon him by Steve Bannon, who is rapidly emerging as the puppeteer of this administration. In rapid succession, we have seen the order, the public reaction, the temporary stay ordered by a Federal District Court [I hope I have this right], and the initial refusal of various officials, ostensibly acting for the Trump administration, to comply with the stay.A number of commentators have begun to talk of a Constitutional crisis. I think that talk is premature, although the situation has the potential to develop into such a crisis. I believe, without actually knowing, that American legal history is replete with instances in which the Federal Government has failed to comply with court orders, and we all know that there have been many such failures by State governments.How might things become dramatically worse? Well, if Trump orders the Justice Department to challenge the court order at the appellate level, if the courts rule against the Administration, if the case is taken to the Supreme Court, and if it too rules the ban unconstitutional, and if Trump then declares that as President he does not have to abide by the decision of the Supreme Court, THEN we have a constitutional crisis. But we are a long way from that.We must keep in mind that the power of the President consists entirely in his or her ability to get large numbers of strategically placed people [including the military] to do what he or she says. TR was in good shape, and Lincoln was tall, and Jackson, I imagine, was a pretty good fighter, but neither they nor any other presidents ruled literally by being the biggest, toughest person in the room, able to compel obedience by force of arms. The very thought is ludicrous. Recall Karl Marx's lovely footnote in Chapter One of Capital: "[O]ne man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is king."It is for this reason that the efforts to delegitimize Trump are so important. Which brings me to my second observation, vastly less important, but indicative nonetheless. There have been reports that folks in the White House are 'demoralized" by the drumbeat of negative press coverage since the Inauguration. This has spilled out into public first with Press Secretary Sean Spicer's extraordinary attack on the White House Press Corps sitting in front of him, and then yesterday by Kellyanne Conway's intemperate cri de coeur that media people relentlessly attacking Trump should be fired. It is Conway's outburst that I want to talk about, because I think it gives us a peephole into the Bunker.Conway is a successful career Republican pollster. She is smart, quick-witted, glib, and relentlessly on message in her media appearances. Like everyone in her line of work, she understands in her bones that her job is to get favorable press coverage for her boss, whomever her boss is at the moment. It is therefore quite astonishing to hear her attack so violently the people it is her job to woo. I think [I do not know, of course] that such behavior can only reflect the sort of bunker mentality inside the White House that only developed in the last stages of the Nixon presidency or in the Johnson presidency before he withdrew from the 1968 race. That even so seasoned a professional as Conway should be reduced to this state in ten days is astonishing and revealing.Mind you, I would guess that Steve Bannon is delighted by the war with the press, but Conway is a different sort of person entirely. She is a fifty-year old professional married to a partner in a Wall Street law firm, with four children at home. She may be despicable, but she is not a nut. The atmosphere in the West Wing must be toxic!

Sunday, January 29, 2017

Well, right on cue, the courts stopped Trump from doing
something he thought he had succeeded in doing.
We will see how this plays out.
Needless to say, I am watching closely, but I have virtually nothing to
add to the commentary you all have read, some of it by people genuinely
knowledgeable about Constitutional Law.
Accordingly, I am going to take my own advice and stay cool. Several of you have asked questions about Herbert
Marcuse, and so I thought as a diversion I would write today about my memories
of him. This will not be a theoretical
critique of his work, Lord knows, but a mixture of fairly elementary
observations and personal stories. Think
of it, if you will, as that little dish of sherbet upscale restaurants offer
between courses to cleanse the palate.
Much of what I say here can be found in my autobiography. However, long experience has taught me not to
assume that the world has read that compelling work.

I first met Herbert Marcuse in the fall of 1960, when I was
26 and he was 62. I was at the time
co-teaching a sophomore level tutorial with Barrington Moore Jr. in a new
program I headed at Harvard called Social Studies. Marcuse was teaching at Brandeis
University. He and Moore had become
close friends during World War II while both were working in DC at the OSS,
precursor to the CIA. Moore was on the
Russian Desk and Marcuse was on the German Desk. [Parenthetically, many of the leading social
scientists in the U. S. of all political stripes worked at the OSS during the
war, and after the war, despite any political differences they might have had,
they remained fast friends.]

Moore came from old New England money. He was a direct descendent of Clement Clark
Moore, of “T’was the night before Christmas” fame, and his grandfather had been
the Commodore of the New York Yacht Club.
Barry spent the summers on his boat off the Massachusetts coast with his
wife, Betty, whom hehad met at OSS, and his winter vacations
skiing. His proudest boast was that he
had once been asked to join the Alta Ski Patrol. He was tall and thin, and his contempt for
bourgeois capitalist society was as much aristocratic as radical in origins. Barry’s home at Harvard was the Russian
Research Institute because he refused to join the Social Relations Department,
home of Talcott Parsons.

Barry decided that I should meet Herbert, so he and Betty
invited me and my girlfriend [we still talked that way then] to dinner at their
home in a lovely residential part of Cambridge.
Herbert and his wife Inge [widow of Franz Neumann] were the other
guests.

Herbert was a fleshy man with an open face, red cheeks, and
a great shock of white hair. He was rather
imposing at first meeting, and had a very thick German accent. I was almost two generations younger, very
wet behind the ears, but I had one great asset that won him over. To German intellectuals of Marcuse’s generation,
Immanuel Kant was the touchstone, the font of wisdom, the Real Deal. When Marcuse learned that this young
whippersnapper was finishing his first book, on the Critique of Pure Reason, he decided I was o.k. After dinner, while Barry watched with
amusement, Marcuse and I got into an argument about philosophy. Herbert, like many emigré intellectuals from the Frankfurt School, knew next to
nothing about Analytic Philosophy and tended to confuse it with another strange
American aberration, Behavioral Social Science.
At one point, Herbert launched into an attack on Willard Van Orman Quine,
ridiculing Quine’s use of the phrase “The present king of France is bald” to
illustrate the theory of definite descriptions.
I defended Quine, pointing out that the question he was addressing with
that example was one that had also agitated a number of famous medieval philosophers. I must have said something about my admiration
for Quine’s clarity [he had been my undergraduate teacher, and I had taken four
courses and graduate seminars with him before I was old enough to drive.] Marcuse responded by saying that in
philosophy, unclarity is a virtue.

Now, you must understand that Marcuse said this in a thick
accent, and since it flew in the face of everything I had learned in the
preceding ten years, I thought at first that I had misunderstood him. “Did you say that unclarity in philosophy is
a virtue?” “Yes,” Marcuse replied with a
puckish grin. “You are saying that in
philosophy it is a good thing not to be clear?” “Yes,” Marcuse said again, smiling even more
broadly.

At that point I concluded that I had just had dinner with a
madman – a charming, learned, engaging mad man, but a madman none the
less. It was not until four years later,
when Marcuse’s great work, One-Dimensional
Man, was published that I discovered what he had in mind. I think it is worth taking a moment to
explain.

In the late thirties, a group of clued up social scientists descended
on the Hawthorne, IL plant of the Western Electric Company to see whether their
“Operational Research” could do something about labor troubles at the
plant. The complaints of the workers,
they decided, were unhelpfully vague [“wages is too low,” for example, or “the
bathrooms stink”] so they decided to operationalize the concerns of the workers
by asking precise, clear, specific questions about their concerns, concerns which
could then be addressed, one by one, in precise, helpful, operationalized fashion. In One-Dimensional
Man, Marcuse argues that the real source of the worker discontent was the
deep structural exploitation definitive of capitalist economies, exploitation that
affected all of the workers regardless of the particular form in which it was manifested
in each worker’s life. One worker might
have a sick child who needed medicine that his wages did not pay for; a second
might need a more flexible working schedule to accommodate her family
obligations; a third might have weak eyesight that interfered with the
performance of her duties at the speed demanded by the bosses. So long as the workers expressed their
complaints in general, imprecise fashion, they were able to see that they had
common grievances, which made it easier for them to achieve solidarity throughout
the plant and strike for better wages and working conditions. When their problems were operationalized,
worker solidarity was destroyed, because it was made to seem as though they had
nothing in common on which to base that solidarity.

All of which might indeed lead someone to conclude that in
philosophy [a.k.a. social science] unclarity
is a virtue.

Four years after this dinner party, I had moved on, from
Harvard to Chicago and then to Columbia.
One day, I got a call from Barry.
Apparently, he and Herbert had gone to Arnold Tovell at Beacon Press, which
had contracted to publish One-Dimensional
Man, with a proposal for a little book to consist of two essays, one by
Barry on objectivity in social science [he was for it] and the other a chapter
by Herbert on “repressive tolerance” that had never made it into the big book. Tovell said two essays did not make a book,
you needed at least three, so Barry wanted to know whether I would like to
write the third essay, something on Tolerance.

Would I! I was being asked to become a co-author with
Barrington Moore, Jr. and Herbert Marcuse.
I figured my name would be made.
There was one small problem – I had nothing whatsoever to say about the
subject of tolerance. To be honest, I
had never thought about it. But that was
hardly an objection, so I sat down and cranked out an analysis and critique of
Liberalism, which I called “Beyond Tolerance.”

We needed a title for this slender production, so Tovell
called a meeting of the three of us at 25 Beacon Street, the address of the
Press, to brainstorm. We all sat around
a table and fielded ideas, none of which seemed terribly appealing. At last, Herbert, with a straight face,
proposed “A Critique of Pure Tolerance.”
I was appalled. I had recently
published my first book, Kant’s Theory of
Mental Activity, which had received restrained but favorable reviews. “Herbert,” I cried, “if I publish a book with
that title, my name will be mud in the profession!” “Don’t worry,” Marcuse replied with a malicious
smile, “no one will read it.”

Well, Herbert was almost right. Tovell had the brilliant idea of publishing
the little book in hard cover, to get serious reviews, but sized like an
old-fashioned paperback, so that it would be sold in those racks at train
stations and in drug stores where paperbacks were displayed back then. The little book had a stark black cover and looked
like a black version of Mao’s Little Red Book.
Alas Tovell got it backwards. The
book sold like a hardcover, which is to say hardly at all, and was ignored by
reviewers as though it was a paperback.
But then Marcuse’s big book came out just as the “60’s were revving
up. It went viral overseas when Daniel
Cohn-Bendit read the French translation and Rudi Dutschke [“Red Rudi”] read it
in German. Marcuse was hot, so Tovell brought out a new
edition of A Critique of Pure Tolerance,
this time in standard hard and soft covers, and it took off. That first year, the new edition sold 26,000
copies.

Some years later, after I had married my “girlfriend,” fathered
two sons, and moved to Northampton to teach at UMass, My wife and I decided to
drive in to Cambridge to see Barry and Betty Moore. Barry was the godfather of our younger son,
Tobias Barrington Wolff, who was then a darling tow headed three year old known
as Toby. When we got to the Moores’ home
we found that Herbert was there. Herbert
had gone to teach at UC San Diego when Brandeis refused to renew his contract in
1965, and he had recently lost his second wife, Inge. The afternoon was, in its way, a trifle
bizarre. Barry and Betty had never had
children, and Barry had absolutely no idea how to relate to a five year old and
a three year old. All he could think to do with Toby was to talk German to
him! But Marcuse was right in his
element. He picked up one of those old
rotating globes that Barry had on his desk, plunked himself down on the floor,
and spun it around, showing Toby where all the different countries were. Toby was enchanted.

At last, the time came for us to leave. Barry and Herbert walked the four of us to
the curb, where we loaded into our big green Chevy station wagon for the drive
home. As little Toby was about to climb
into the back seat, he stopped, looked up at Marcuse, raised his hand, and said
“Bye, Herbie.”

Marcuse and I crossed paths for the last time fifteen years
later, long after he had passed away. Our
family had moved to Boston so that my wife could accept a professorship at MIT
and I was casting about for a job in the Boston area. Fred Sommers, then the Chair of the
Philosophy Department, went to the Provost to tell him that he wanted to hire
me. The provost said, “What do you want
another Marcuse for?”

Jerry Fresia, a frequent commentator here, sent this message to me. I think someone should run with this. I will buy the first one.

I loved your "loser" analysis and have sent it
around. I'm getting a positive response. Here's my idea....and I've sent this to a few
people in the NE. Sell T-shirts in key
cities with the "LOSER" moniker. This would have to be done in cities
with on-going demonstrations (SF, NYC, Boston, DC, etc.) ...and eventually they
could be sold on web sites if the thing took off. This would accomplish two goals:

1. Raise money

2. Spread the word and delegitimation

Attached is my entry for a T shirt/poster....whatever. And/or make the thing an invitation for people
to come up with their own "LOSER" T-shirts! Just a thought.

Saturday, January 28, 2017

I have been trying speculatively to figure out what sequence
of events might make things really blow up for Trump. I do not think crowds or crowd estimates or negative
signs or the like will do it, although I think all are useful. But there is one sequence of events that
could, I am guessing, really pay off. If
Trump were to try to do something that a court ruled illegal [such as the
current ban against immigration from a number of countries], if Trump ordered
Sessions as Attorney General to challenge the ruling at an appellate level, if
he were then ruled against all the way to the Supreme Court [as I think would be
likely if it was an open and shut case], I could really imagine Trump then declaring
that as President he is above the law, which would create a full blown constitutional
crisis.

I don’t know French very well, despite owning an apartment
in Paris, but as long ago as 1955, when I was there for a month as a traveling
student, I picked up some phrases that all conveyed more or less the same
thought: I’m cool. One of them was ça m’est égal. Another was je suis en balance.

After just one week of Trump as President, I find myself in
need of these phrases, simply as a way of maintaining some equilibrium. In all of my eighty-three years, I have never
experienced such a whirlwind of opinion and activity and energy and fury in the
public sphere, not even during the Viet Nam War or after the murder of Dr.
King. Every day, more information pours
in on me, every drop of which seems important, urgent, demanding my immediate
attention. I have gone to two
demonstrations in four days, which is two more than I went to in the preceding
thirty years. I seem to be blogging more
or less constantly, driven by a compelling fear that I am not doing as much as
I ought. Each day, two or three or a
dozen analyses of the situation are written, every one of which strikes me as
more insightful and important than anything I have written.

We are in for a long war.
Burning out in the first three weeks is very definitely a bad idea. I need to find some way to keep acting,
writing, protesting, fighting week after week, month after month, never losing
my cool, never becoming off balance, but nevertheless carrying on
relentlessly. There are quite literally
tens of millions in this struggle as well, and I am convinced that it is a
struggle we can win.

In the days ahead, I shall try to maintain some
equilibrium. One of the things it might
be useful for me to do is to think and write about what winning the struggle would look like, so that if we start to
succeed, we will know that we are, and will be encouraged to carry on.

Kamran Heiss [is that a real person or is it a nom de web?] suggests that I might offer "a lecture series on philosophy in the age of Trump.
Exploring philosophical approaches to authoritarianism, fascism,
totalitarianism, racism. Drawing on resources like the Frankfurt School,
Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Horkheimer, Marx etc." I am, as it happens, woefully underprepared for such an effort, but the suggestion did make me reflect that we are now in an historical moment that cries out for the particular combination of talents and interests of the Frankfurt School. Their genius, of course, was the bringing together of the large scale systematic analysis of Marx with the depth psychology of Freud, in such works as The Authoritarian Personality and Eros and Civilization. Each day, I find myself shuttling back and forth between my efforts to get a handle on the structural unfoldings that have given us a far-right proto-fascist regime in Washington and my struggle to anatomize the infantile psychological behavior of Trump.I don't really know whether we need more than the most superficial understanding of what we face today to decide what we ought to do, but however this moment in history turns out, it is likely to produce an extraordinary spate of books [assuming they are permitted to be published.]

Someone emailed me about my old essay, Beyond Tolerance, which appears in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, a little book that Barrington Moore, Herbert Marcuse and I published fifty-two years ago. I re-read my essay [which I had almost totally forgotten] in order to reply, but when I went looking for the email, I could not find it. If the author will forgive me, will he send me another email so that I can send my reply?

This list will be saved, and a new list will be opened, to be posted next Friday. I find inspiring this detailed account of actions being taken coast to coast. There appear to have been a number of our little community at the big Washington march, as well as many more at regional marches.

Friday, January 27, 2017

The Friday List of things we have all done is, I think, a good idea, for at least two reasons. First, it gives all of us good ideas of things to do. And Second, it tells me that there are lots of folks out there doing a good deal more than what I am doing, which gives me hope and prods me to get off my behind and act.Each Friday, I will post a list of everything you have reported in the preceding week. Don't be shy about reporting in.

David and J. W. F. have both put up lengthy comments that deserve your attention. Thank you both. I recommend that all of you read both comments. This is, once again, evidence of the intelligence and commitment of the readers of this blog.

Well, I floated the idea of a Friday list of things we have done, but I had not really figured out how to organize it. Let me try this: Each time any of you [NOT JUST THE USUAL SUSPECTS] does something, anything, to contribute to the struggle, post a brief comment. I will round them all up and post them in a list each Friday.Here is my list since last Friday, to start:Went to the Washington MarchWent to a Raleigh, NC demonstration at Senator Tillis' officeCalled the offices of both of my senators.Called the offices of the NC Legislature House and Senate leaders [both Republicans]Signed a gazillion on-line petitionsGave money to the ACLUGave money to a lefty organizationBlogged about the crisis almost every day

Went to Women's March
Signed online petition on Trump's taxes
Called my Senator
Recruited three friends to attend an Our Revolution meeting for next week
Recruited my Red State Liberal father-in-law to do many of these things

Gene said...

Not much this week, but I did write and publish this
http://www.nutmeggerdaily.com/?p=700 trying to articulate exactly why it's so
scary.

Called my US-rep (Republican Rodney Davis of IL-13) to ask
when he would be holding a town hall. Apparently a lot of other people in the
district had a similar idea, because later than day he announced that he would
hold a "virtual town hall". (In his previous two terms he's never
held a town hall of any kind, virtual or real.)

Called my US-rep this morning to tell him that I hoped he would push back
against Trump claiming that there was vote fraud. I phrased it as "Trump
impugning the honesty of the voters of the IL-13th, and my local County
Clerk" (our County Clerk is also Republican).

Called my (Democratic) senators to tell them they are doing great jobs and that
I'll fully support them if they decide to vote against confirming Sessions,
Pruitt, Tillerson, and especially DeVos.

2. I did a little informal fund-raising for a Democratic legislative district
organization south of Seattle--a swing district turning blue. The Republican
state Senator in that district said publicly that the Womxn's march was
unAmerican and unChristian. That turned into a good fundraising opportunity.

3. When I caught wind that an anti Planned Parenthood group was planning a
demonstration in a suburb south of Seattle on February 11, I spread the word.
There is now an official pro Planned Parenthood demonstration in the works.
Thankfully someone else is organizing it so I don't have to

Christopher M. said...

1. Went to the Disrupt J20 march.

2. Went to the Women's March on Washington.

3. Emailed siggerudk@gao.gov, minellit@gao.gov, and congrel@gao.gov at the
Government Accountability Office in support of Senator Warren's request to
audit Trump's finances for conflicts of interest.

4. Made all of the phone calls listed at https://5calls.org/ - left a few
messages, got a few human beings.

5. Called my mayor and city councilmembers to thank them for their support of
DC's sanctuary city status.

As I promised, I am going to continue today to talk about
the crisis we face, but I have a confession to make first. I don’t like talking about Trump. It makes me angry, sad, disgusted even to
think about him. I would much rather be
talking about Marx, or Kant, or Hume, or Plato, or Kierkegaard, or Game Theory. If I may repeat a story I have told here
before, sometime in the late ‘60s I gave a talk at a Columbia University faculty
seminar on Mill, excoriating him for the failings of his political theory. Hannah Arendt was in the audience and she
came up at the end to say hello. She
pretty obviously hadn’t much liked the talk, but she was polite. “What are you working on now?” she
asked. “I am writing a book on Kant’s
ethics,” I replied. Her face broke into
a broad smile. “Ah,” she exclaimed, “it
is so much more pleasant to spend time with Kant!”

But duty calls. Today
I shall engage in some speculation about Trump the man, about what makes him
tick, and how we might use our conclusions to influence him and even, perhaps,
to damage his ability to harm this country and the world. My observations will be psychological, not
political. Now, we litigated here some
while ago the appropriateness of using medical terms drawn from psychoanalysis
to describe Trump, and we agreed that doing so was unwarranted since I am not a
trained analyst and neither I nor anyone reading this blog has the sort of
clinical access to Trump on which a medical diagnosis could be based. But as I noted then, and will repeat now,
people have been sizing up other people at least since the start of recorded
history and in all likelihood for 100,000 years before that. All of us form judgments about people every
day, based on our experience and observations, and I do not intend to refrain from
doing so simply because I am unable to offer clinical justification for my judgments. Do with these reflections what you will.

The first thing we must understand is that Trump is not a
normal person whose actions fall within the customary parameters of adult behavior. Let me offer a few examples in support of
this claim. These are not large and
significant official actions of the sort that make the news, as it were. But that is just the point. All of us learn to judge others on the basis
of small but telling signs that we are conditioned by long evolution and experience
to pick up on. Sometimes we call this
body language. Poker players call them “tells.” We notice subtle changes in speech or facial
expression or voice. This is neither
arcane nor controversial. Indeed,
without attention to these clues we would have trouble walking down a crowded
street without bumping into people.

Here are a number of observations I have made of Trump that
set off alarm bells in my head.
One: Trump lies about things that
are common knowledge to the people he is talking to. He tweets that Meryl Streep is a failure as
an actress, for God’s sake. This has
been so widely commented on that I need not cite examples. Two:
Trump is obsessed with issues of size. He exaggerates the size of his hands, the
size of his genitalia, the size of his fortune, the size of the buildings that
bear his name, the size of his election victory, the size of the crowds he
draws for his speeches. Three: Trump uses language in primitive ways that
reveal an almost complete lack of thought or knowledge behind them. One example that struck me especially
powerfully was his bizarre claim, in referring to his speeches, that “I have
the best words.” Think about that for a moment. What can he possibly have meant by that? Four:
Trump makes claims that are absurd and immediately refutable, apparently
simply because at the moment he is
making them it feels good to make them.
I am sure many of you could add countless additional examples.

What do I make of all this?
First, it seems obvious to me that Trump’s mental processes are
extremely psychologically primitive. They
are the thought processes of a child of three or four or five. Now, let us be clear, all of us start out as
infants, and if Freud is correct, as I believe he is, we carry along with us
throughout our lives the primitive thought processes that develop in us as
infants [“primary thought processes,” Freud calls them.] But in normal adults, reality-tested secondary
thought processes have been acquired and overlie the primary processes, which nevertheless
live on in the unconscious and never cease affecting our experience of or thought
about the world. It is a commonplace, or
ought to be, that even such refined intellectual activities as Logic and
Mathematics are driven and shaped by psychic energies and drives buried deep
within us that find expression, in sublimated form, in such expressions as “driving
a proof through” or “tearing a putative logical demonstration to shreds.” This is normal, and the behavior rooted in
these repressed or sublimated desires and drives is well within the parameters
of the normal.

But some people are psychologically damaged. They never successfully integrate those
secondary thought processes with the primary processes and the drives that fuel
them. Such people quite often acquire a
patina of normality, as it were. They
may have nice party manners and be quite capable of pursuing adult activities
successfully. But the never reach the point
at which they actually grow up, to put it as simply as I can. Trump, I believe, is such a person.

Let me say a word about why I consider him infantile. This is a little tricky, so follow along, if
you will. It is clearly obsessively
important to Trump to be the alpha male, as primatologists call it. Now, this is hardly uncommon. Indeed, it is hard to see how anyone could
make a sustained and successful drive for the presidency without a deep and
powerful need to be first, a winner, The Big Cheese. But most
adults who have this drive define winning, being first, being the big cheese in
real world symbolic ways. Holding the
title of President is for them the
goal, the measure of success. Trump, like
a child, obsesses about physically and visually immediate evidences of
dominance. A case in point is the size
of the crowd on Inauguration Day as compared both with Obama’s Inauguration Day
crowds and the crowd of the protest the day after Inauguration. And it is not simply the numbers that he
obsesses about, it is the pictures. This is very primitive thinking.

The terms “narcissist” and “sociopath” have been used a good
deal to describe Trump, and I think they are useful shorthand ways of summarizing
our observations and intuitions about him.
Countless observers have written about Trump’s need to exercise
dominance over those around him, about his bullying, his cruelty, hid need to
humiliate those who have opposed him. To
an extraordinary extent, Trump seems not actually to be able to grasp and
employ the notion of other people. As an old friend observed to me, he treats
his children as extensions of himself and his wives as possessions. I would add that he treats everyone else as
objects, not persons. In the jargon of
an early video game that my sons played when they were boys, he treats them as mushrooms.

All the evidence suggests that Trump is extraordinarily
insecure, that he has, as many people have put it, a “fragile ego.” I would say rather that he has an imperfectly
formed ego. This same old friend offered
a judgment that startled me when he first said it, but which has struck me as
more and more insightful on reflection.
He said that the day Trump walked into the White House after the
Inauguration was the worst day of his life, because [if I am getting this
right] he felt as empty, inadequate, and small then as ever, and he had just
secured the biggest prize in the world, the prize that he hoped would make him finally
feel whole.

If these speculations are correct, then Trump as president
is a uniquely dangerous person. What can
we do to weaken him, undermine him, even, God willing, make him self-destruct?

Some thoughts.
Probably you all saw reports, and perhaps pictures, of the sign
proclaiming “RESIST” that some brave souls hung from the crossarm of a huge
construction crane within sight of the White House. I applaud their courage and initiative, but I
think the gesture would have been vastly more effective if they had instead
hung a sign that said “LOSER.” A sign
reading “RESIST” simply tells Trump that he is dominant, that he is strong, that
those whom he is dominating are reduced to calling for resistance. After all, no one would call for resistance
to someone who is weak. It would not be necessary. But Trump would be simply incapable of
ignoring a sign calling him a loser, because
that is what he really fears he is.

Is there someplace visible from the Oval Office where, every
day, picketers could stand carrying signs declaring Trump a loser, declaring him
illegitimate, calling him small? If so,
it would be worth the effort to station people there. Let him call the Capitol Police to drive them
away. That would be the news channel
story of the day.

What is going to happen?
I honestly do not know. Today is
January 20th. Impossible as
it is to keep this simple fact in mind, it
is only one week since the Inauguration.
There are growing evidences that Trump’s White House is chaos, that
staffers are deeply unsettled by the lack of ordinary routine work. It seems clear, and terrifying, that Steve
Bannon has great influence over Trump.
But on the evidence we have seen thus far, Trump seems to be completely overwhelmed
by the job of President, flailing about for quick, symbolic actions that cannot
in act be effectuated [the confusion surrounding payment for The Wall is a case
in point.]

I believe that my characterization of Trump is correct, but
I do not know how we can use this understanding, if it is correct, to weaken
him.

Thursday, January 26, 2017

In preperation for tomorrow's post, I would you all to read this story, most of which is a tweet storm [is that the right term?] from someone self-identified as a White House mid-level staffer. I will have a good deal to say about it tomorrow.

I have spent virtually my entire life thinking and writing
about subjects that interested only a few: The
Critique of Pure Reason, A Treatise of
Human Nature, the less erotic aspects of Marx’s economic theory, even
anarchism, although what I wrote on that last topic won a rather larger
audience than I anticipated. Now, in my
dotage, I find myself writing about subjects so current in the public
consciousness that I am truly, as I so often say, merely a pebble rolling down
a hill in a landslide.

Today, I should like to start talking about what we can all
do to fight Trump, and I anticipate that virtually nothing I say will be at all
new. Indeed, much, if not all, of what I
shall say has been anticipated just yesterday on this blog by the comment of
David. So be it. In this fight, we need not a few, not
thousands, but millions and tens of millions of actions. If, in this obscure corner of the
blogosphere, I can encourage a few of you to take actions you might not otherwise
have considered, I shall be content. And
if, as Unknown suggests, my anxiety is excessive, my comments “hyperbolic,” I
shall breath a deep sigh of relief and return to the contemplation of my
circles, as Kierkegaard would have it.

Perhaps it will be useful to distinguish actions designed to
affect the existing constellation of political forces, actions designed to
change the constellation of political forces, actions designed to counteract Trump’s
malign decisions, and actions designed to destabilize or unhinge Trump himself.

I. Actions designed
to affect the existing constellation of forces.

The American political system is extremely complex, more so
even than the political systems of other large advanced capitalist states. The Federal structure of our government
creates a great many centers of power, each of which affects and is affected by
the others but is itself semi-independent.
Here are some things we can do to influence the actions of those who
control those centers of power.

A Bring pressure to
bear on Democratic senators to use the considerable resources of their office
to block everything that Trump proposes.
That includes a large infrastructure
bill putatively designed to create working class and middle class jobs. If such a bill is passed, it will strengthen
Trump’s political hand, and the fact that it passed with Democratic votes will
serve to legitimate him. It is vital to delegitimate Trump in every
way available. The threat he poses is
too great for any compromise.

B. Affirmatively
support mayors and governors who declare sanctuary cities and resist Trump’s
attempt to destroy them. Hundreds of
mayors and governors have already taken this step, and they need to hear that
you support them. This is important for
two reasons: First, because of the
protection it will give to at-risk undocumented men, women, and children, and Second,
because Trump will experience this resistance as a threat to his dominance,
which is what he really cares about.
Anything that makes him feel weak, a “loser,” disrespected, will work to
destabilize him.

C. Bring pressure on
the working press to call out Trump’s lies, challenge the putative normality of
his behavior and statements, and refuse to serve as conduits for his fantasies. Sixty seconds of Googling yielded this list
of officers of the White House Press Corps:

You will notice that none of these is a household name. I bet they do not get all that many messages
from the public, compared with, say, Jim Acosta, Major Garrett, or Chris
Jansing.

D. Contact
existing State Representatives, State Senators, and Governors [Google will give
you their phone numbers and identities.]
I have repeatedly read or heard that even a few hundred calls from
constituents make a disproportionately large impression on these folks. Call your reps if they are Democrats, call
them if the Republicans, but call them. Yesterday
I called the North Carolina House and Senate majority leaders [both
republicans] urging them not to block the new Democratic Governor’s attempt to
accept Medicare expansion in North Carolina.
The young staffers who answered the phone made it clear they had been
swamped with calls.

Enough for today.
Tomorrow I will talk about ways of changing the existing constellation
of political forces.

Later today, I will have a few suggestions about things we
can all do in the struggle against Trump, but I can never resist the temptation
to tout my own books, so …

Forty-six years ago, when I was desperately scrabbling to
pay for two full-scale analyses and publishing everything I could lay claim to,
I signed a contract to edit a collection of original essays on American
politics called 1984 Revisited – Prospects
for American Politics. I rounded up
some folks I knew to write essays. Each
author was paid $500, which would be $3000 today – not too shabby. Todd Gitlin, Gene Mason, Robert Nakamura,
Michael Lerner, Ira Katznelson, and Frances Fox Piven stepped up to the plate
and I wrote an Introduction. The book
made no impression at all on the world, but the title was great. Maybe I ought to do another one.

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

The present crisis has elicited from some of the regular readers of this blog unusually insightful, pointed, and even highly literate comments. Thank you all. We are in a fight, but there is no reason why we cannot acknowledge and even take pleasure in the intelligence of our discourse. I shall do my best to rise to the standard thus set.

Those of us who choose to make our careers in the Academy
learn even as undergraduates that its greatest virtue is originality. Correspondingly, its greatest vice is
plagiarism. To have a new idea, an idea
never before expressed, is a triumph worthy of the greatest reward the Academy
has to offer – tenure. But to steal
another’s idea warrants expulsion. I
have lived my life by these twin commandments, striving always to say something
new and obsessively crediting those who have said anything even passably
similar with the academic get out of jail free card, the footnote. But not every philosopher has embraced these
twinned norms. Recall the exquisite
passage in the Gorgias, which I have
quoted before [giving credit to Plato, of course.] Here is what I said in this space several
years ago [I cannot help it, I even footnote myself!]

“Callicles has triumphantly announced his brilliant new
doctrine -- justice is the interest of the stronger -- and he impatiently
awaits the praise of those listening. Socrates quietly undertakes to
explore this novel teaching, using everyday examples of cobblers and ship
builders and herdsmen. Callicles is deflated by this banausic
colloquy, and finally says, in exasperation, ‘Socrates, you keep saying the
same thing.’ And Socrates replies, ‘Yes, Callicles, and in the same
way, too.’ This is so beautiful that it makes me weep every time I
read it. Callicles is in thrall to what Kierkegaard, twenty-two
hundred years later, would call the Aesthetic, a mode of existence that strives
above all for novelty. But Socrates is committed to the search for
moral truth, which is eternal and never changes. So he is content to
say the same thing, over and over, and in the same way.”

These past few days, I have been growing increasingly
alarmed by the behavior of Trump and his minions. As I have surfed the web, reading analysis
after analysis, I have reflected that there already exists a vast and quite brilliant
body of literature devoted to precisely the sorts of political behaviors we
have been witnessing. I refer to the
writings of the great German, French, American and other social theorists of
the middle of the 20th century whose best work was devoted to an
anatomization of Nazism. For Horkheimer,
Adorno, Arendt, Fromm, Marcuse, Benjamin, Orwell, Camus, Sartre and many, many
others the Nazi regime was the defining event of their personal and
intellectual lives. The Frankfurt School
intellectuals in particular were driven to understand how a culturally rich,
intellectually vibrant Weimer Republic could devolve so rapidly into the
horrors of Nazism. In countless books,
some of the century’s greatest intellectuals and scholars anatomized the Nazi
era, most of them having fled to England or America.

With the benefit of their insights, we can now see the
relationship between small beginnings and disastrous endings. I have been struggling to gain some understanding
of what is happening in these early days of the Trump regime. I claim absolutely no originality for my
observations and reflections. The best
of them, if there are any deserving of praise, are simply repetitions of the
thoughts of others. I am retired and
have no need of tenure.

Let me begin by drawing a distinction. Some of the bad things Trump is doing or is
proposing to do, along with many terrible things the Republican majorities in
Congress are planning to do, are, if I may put it this way, standard issue
terrible things that are the predictable and unavoidable consequence of the
workings of democracy. These include
attacks on women’s reproductive health, attacks on the social safety net,
attacks on public schools, massive tax cuts for the rich, further economic
burdens for the poor and the middle classes, an assault on America’s foreign
policy obligations, and the closing of the borders to immigrants and refugees. All of these have been on the Republicans’
wish list for decades, and their control of both the Executive and Legislative
branches of government gives them an opportunity to achieve them. There is nothing new about all of this, and
we know how to fight it: get out the
vote and take back control of the House and Senate. Most of what the Republicans seek to
accomplish is actually opposed by a majority of Americans. If they will get off their collective asses
and vote, we can stop them. These things
are not evidence of a flaw in the American political system. They are evidence that more Republicans than
Democrats vote in off year elections.
But what about gerrymandering and voter suppression laws? They are the result of Republican control of
state governments, which in turn is a consequence of low Democratic turnout in
off year elections. If Democrats turn
out in off year elections, they can take back state houses and legislatures in
time for the 2020 census, on the basis of which new non-gerrymandered districts
can be drawn and voter suppression laws can be repealed. If Democrats cannot be bothered to turn out
for these off year elections, they have only themselves to blame for all the
terrible things Republicans do. Mind
you, gerrymandering is not the only problem, nor are voter suppression
laws. Part of the problem is that
Democrats are demographically more concentrated than Republicans. Unless five million California Democrats wish
to sacrifice themselves on the altar of progress and move to Kansas or Texas,
there is nothing much to be done about that.

But there are some actions the Trump coterie are beginning
to take that are completely different from these old and well-understood
threats. If all those books by all those
social theorists are right, then what we have been seeing these past few days
are the very first signs of an incipient totalitarian fascism. If I am right [or rather if Orwell,
Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, Marcuse, Arendt, and all the rest are right], then
we had better act right now to stop this before we lose the ability to oppose
it. What am I talking about in these
apocalyptic terms?

Well, I am, for example, talking about Trump’s obsessive
insistence that he won the popular vote, if you subtract five million “illegals”
who voted. I am talking about Trump’s
obsessive insistence that more people attended his Inauguration than Obama’s. I am talking about Trump making his Press
Secretary, Sean Spicer, appear before the White House Press Corps and repeat
these obviously false claims.

But this just shows that Trump is a self-deluded
narcissist. What on earth does this have
to do with fascism? Let me reproduce
here most of a profound and, in my judgment, important column by Tyler Cowen of
Bloomberg News. [This is what I mean
when I say that I am going to rely on the wisdom of others rather than strive
for originality.]

“One of the most striking features of the early Trump
administration has been its political uses of lying. The big weekend story was
the obviously false claim of Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, that
Trump pulled in the largest inauguration crowds in American history. This
raises the question of why a leader might find it advantageous to promote such
lies from his subordinates.

First and most obviously, the leader wishes to mislead the
public, and wants to have subordinates doing so, in part because many citizens
won’t pursue fact-checking. But that’s the obvious explanation, and the truth
runs much deeper.

By requiring subordinates to speak untruths, a leader can
undercut their independent standing, including their standing with the public,
with the media and with other members of the administration. That makes those
individuals grow more dependent on the leader and less likely to mount
independent rebellions against the structure of command. Promoting such chains
of lies is a classic tactic when a leader distrusts his subordinates and
expects to continue to distrust them in the future.

Another reason for promoting lying is what economists
sometimes call loyalty filters. If you want to ascertain if someone is truly
loyal to you, ask them to do something outrageous or stupid. If they balk, then
you know right away they aren’t fully with you. That too is a sign of incipient
mistrust within the ruling clique, and it is part of the same worldview that
leads Trump to rely so heavily on family members.

In this view, loyalty tests are especially frequent for new
hires and at the beginning of new regimes, when the least is known about the
propensities of subordinates. You don’t have to view President Trump as
necessarily making a lot of complicated
calculations, rather he may simply be replicating tactics that he found
useful in his earlier business and media careers.

Trump’s supporters are indeed correct to point out that
previous administrations also told many lies, albeit of a different sort.
Imagine, for instance, that mistruths come in different forms: higher-status
mistruths and lower-status mistruths. The high-status mistruths are like those
we associate with ambassadors and diplomats…. These higher-status lies are not
Trump’s style, and thus many of his supporters, with some justification, see
him as a man willing to voice important truths. If Trump’s opponents don’t
understand that reality, and the sociological differences between various kinds
of misdirection, they are going to underestimate his appeal and
self-righteously underestimate how much they are themselves mistrusted by the
public.

Trump specializes in lower-status lies, typically more of
the bald-faced sort, namely stating “x” when obviously “not x” is the case.
They are proclamations of power, and signals that the opinions of mainstream
media and political opponents will be disregarded. The lie needs to be
understood as more than just the lie. For one thing, a lot of Americans,
especially many Trump supporters, are more comfortable with that style than
with the “fancier” lies they believe they are hearing from the establishment.
For another, joining the Trump coalition has been made costlier for marginal outsiders
and ignoring the Trump coalition is now less likely for committed opponents. In
other words, the Trump administration is itself sending loyalty signals to its
supporters by burning its bridges with other groups.

These lower-status lies are also a short-run strategy. They
represent a belief that a lot can be pushed through fairly quickly, bundled
with some obfuscation of the truth, and that long-term credibility does not
need to be maintained. Once we get past blaming Trump for various misdeeds,
it’s worth taking a moment to admit we should be scared he might be right about
that.

So the overall picture is this: The Trump administration
trusts neither its own appointees nor its own supporters, and is creating a
situation where that lack of trust is reciprocal.”

That is the first thing I have in mind when I talk of
incipient totalitarian fascism. Here is
another thing. “U.S. President Donald
Trump’s administration has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to
remove the climate change page from its website, two agency employees told
Reuters, the latest move by the newly minted leadership to erase ex-President
Barack Obama’s climate change initiatives.”
Trump is not merely reversing Obama’s climate change policy. He is trying to stop government agencies from
making public the facts resulting from their standard work. Trump is taking the first steps to redefine
what the government proclaims as simple fact.
It is undertaking, by fiat, to alter reality.

What steps might we expect next? I anticipate that Trump will issue executive
orders abrogating existing civil rights.
If faced with a rebuke from the courts, he will flagrantly defy court
orders, daring anyone to stop him. He
will try to use the Capitol police to stop demonstrations against his policies,
regardless of whether those demonstrations are legal. If he gets away with all of this, he may attempt
to interfere with local elections, claiming that foreign terrorists are
threatening his regime. Might he even,
in four years’ time, declare his re-election a fact before the votes have been
cast? If he has been able to get away
with all the other acts undermining democratic procedures in the interim, of
course he will.

Why I am I so frightened?
Because I have seen this before in innumerable countries, some of them
European countries with educated electorates.

Which leaves one more question: How do we stop him now, before he grows so
powerful that we cannot? I do not
know. Tomorrow I will struggle with that
question.

This was published two weeks ago. Read it. It is true. We are at war, we are not having a polite discussion in an Oxbridge Senior Common Room. All that matters is winning, and we have the troops, if we can mobilize them.

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Today, around the nation, there are a number of local demonstrations focused on the appalling collection of horrors nominated for the Cabinet. Susie and I managed to find our way to one noon-time demonstration at the Raleigh, NC office of Senator Thom Tillis, one of this benighted state's two Republican senators [It was Susie's first demonstration ever.] The temperature wasn't bad, but stiff winds made it feel cold, at least to these ancient bones. Roughly 130 people gathered to do a little call and response chanting, sing a song or two, and hear speeches. Since the Senator's office is in a federal building, admission is limited, but two by two we were allowed just barely in the lobby to sign the visitor's book and chat with a pleasant, clueless young woman on the Senator's staff.

A bit of a comedown after the Washington spectacular, but every tiny bit helps. At the very least, I now know how to get there, so the next time will be easier. I will add the visit to my end of the week list.

Meanwhile, really bad things are going down in Washington, and it is taking all of my innate good spirits to keep from descending into despair. The harm that will be done to tens of millions of people by these animals is beyond contemplating.

I do not have the heart right now for some snarky commentary on Trump's pathetic, sociopathic fixation on the relative smallness of his Inauguration Day crowd. Maybe later.

Monday, January 23, 2017

One of the things you learn when you start teaching at a
university is that although graduate students can probably handle being required
just to write a final “term paper” for a course, undergraduates need some
along-the-way feedback and evaluation to help them produce acceptable
work. Well, when it comes to the sort of
political action we are trying to undertake in the wake of the Trump victory,
we are all undergraduates, so there needs to be some way to keep track of what
we are doing and keep our spirits up.
How can I help?

Here is an idea I had while taking the garbage out to the
dumpster behind my condo building [I lead a rather romantic life.] Suppose each Friday, everyone who wants to
makes a comment on this blog about what he or she has done in the last week. I will copy all the reports into a text and post
it. Folks can get some psychic credit
for their efforts and also pick up tips from other people’s reports. If enough people take the trouble to report
in, and if people actually DO something,
we can create the sense that in this little corner of the blogosphere, we are
on the march.

One of my devices for avoiding the sight of Trump's face on television has been to binge watch a rather large amount of the schlock series called Defiance. No need for me to sketch the lineaments of the story. Suffice it to say that one of the seven extraterrestrial races to have shown up in post-apocalyptic St. Louis is a group of very, very white people who bath communally and have a heightened sense of honor. When one of them has done something really bad, he is strung up by hands and feet on a "shaming rack," the ropes of which are pulled tighter and tighter as each member of their little band comes forward and drops another rock in a basket until the poor slob is torn apart. Very poetic.I just called the offices of my two North Carolina Republican senators and left a message opposing Trump's nominee for Secretary of Education. I think of this as two more tiny pebbles in the basket of the shaming rack.

DML posted this as a comment, but not everyone reads comments, so I am reposting it here. I suspect we are going to have to take on and defeat the party regulars before we can really make some progress."A few things to be aware of:

1. For reasons I don't know, the Our Revolution people have been a lot more
organized around California. The Democratic party recently had its party
reorganization there, where low level party leaders are elected, and they
turned out pretty massively to elect a majority of delegates. These are usually
low key, under-the-radar, low attendance meetings, that are attended by party
insiders, but this year, most of the caucuses were jam packed. Good story about
it here:
http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/315040-sanders-backers-take-over-california-democratic-party

Our Revolution is trying to replicate this everywhere, but different states
reorganize at different times (Maryland, where I live, doesn't do it for two
more years), and they are trying to research the process and prioritize; more
states are reorganizing over the next few weeks. You need to join their site,
and then you'll get a Slack (kind of like Facebook) invitation, which is where
a lot of the online action is around this.

2. I've also been informed of this.

https://swingleft.org

Its targeting swing congressional districts, and directing willing volunteers
where to put their energies. I don't know much about it, but it seems worthy.

3. The Women's March website has a "10 things in 100 days" program.
Thing #1 is to send a post-card (that you download from their site) to your
legislator about an issue. I'm a little dubious about this. I think phone calls
are more effective, BUT I now know of two different "postcard
parties" being hosted this week, where you drop by, hang out, and write your
postcard (the hosts have everything set up to do this). I'm going to one
tomorrow more for the solidarity and fellowship than the postcard itself. This
could be a good tool for face to face organizing.

4. Finally, its worth noting, that this massively successful march had zero to
do with the Democratic party. Its "official" leaders (Schumer, Pelosi
etc.) were no where to be seen, and all of the DNC chair candidates were at a
high dollar donor retreat in Florida along with the detestable David Brock. I
can think of no better display of the complete disconnect between the party,
and the people it purports to represent."

Well, the marches are over.
They were a spectacular international success. Not bad for a woman in Hawaii who posted an
appeal on FaceBook. Now we must ask, as
is everyone, what do we do next? There
is no single answer, and it is a waste of time to argue about it. I will say again, as I have said so often,
Find something you like to do and keep doing it. I will write for this blog, not because I
imagine for a moment that it is important, but because I enjoy it and know that
I will continue to do it until I grow senile or my little fingers become too
stiff to type.

If you are casting about for things to do, here are several,
lifted from Michael Moore and others.

1. Donate such money
as you can afford to any of the countless organizations marching in the right
direction. In my neck of the woods, a
Starbucks coffee and biscotti cost about $4.19.
Forego that once a month and click on “make it monthly” when PayPal asks
you for your credit card info. If two
million people give $5 a month each, that is $120 million a year, more than
enough to make a real difference.

2. Google your Senators
and Representative, find their local offices, and call them once a week to urge
them to do whatever is on your mind that week.
Currently, asking them to vote against Jeff Sessions or Betsy DeVos for
cabinet posts is a good one. Don’t
anguish over the message. Nobody but the
poor schlub answering the phone will ever hear it. But the call will be counted, and there is a
good deal of evidence that even several hundred calls to an elected politician’s
office make an impression.

3. If you have the
bad luck to be living in a Republican controlled state, Google your State Rep
and Senator and make calls to them. The
smaller the district and the more local the elected representative, the bigger
the impact of those calls.

4. When
OurRevolution gets its act together and puts up its interactive list of local
groups, join one. I am not about to be a
community organizer, what with my obligations at home and my age, but I can
certainly join a group and go to a meeting from time to time.

We are just getting started, folks, and from the evidence of
the past two days, we have plenty of company.

Sunday, January 22, 2017

The reports you all are posting of marches in your cities are remarkable and enormously encouraging. But since I am, when all is said and done, a pedant, not an organizer, I will pause to give voice to an utterly irrelevant pet peeve. I apologize for the interruption. The revolution will continue momentarily.For a variety of reason having mostly to do with its mongrel pedigree, English exhibits a distinction between what are called strong and weak verbs. Weak verbs form the past tense by adding "ed." I walk, I walked, I cook, I cooked, I kiss, I kissed. Strong verbs form the past tense by altering the present tense itself: I run, I ran, I bring, I brought, I think, I thought, I fly, I flew [except when I am playing baseball, in which case I fly to left field, I flied to left field, not I flew.]"Freight" is a noun meaning, roughly, cargo put aboard a ship or truck. It was originally the present tense of the verb "to freight," which is to say "to load with goods for transport." The past tense of freight is fraught.So, to say of a situation that it is fraught with significance or danger is essentially to say that the situation is loaded or weighed down with significance or danger as though [metaphorically] with cargo.It doesn't make any sense to describe a situation, simpliciter, as fraught.Now, back to the revolution.

A bunker, for those of you who missed World War Two, is a
concrete and metal reinforced shelter, mostly underground, where troops can
crouch and protect themselves from bombs or incoming artillery fire. In modern times, every Presidential
Administration has had a complex relationship with the press, and more broadly,
with the world outside the White House.
On the one hand, the White House crew want to use the press to put out
their positive, rosy message about the wonderful things they are doing for the
American people, so the person charged with dealing daily with the Press, the
White House Press Spokesperson, cultivates a personal relationship with the
reporters regularly assigned to the White House, favoring them with inside
tips, learning their names, joking with them, and wooing them in an effort to
extract from them favorable coverage. On
the other hand, even the tamest of reporters has shark DNA, and circles for the
kill if there is blood in the water.
When things are going smoothly for an Administration, a skilled Press Spokesperson
balances these forces reasonably well, but when really bad things are going
down, the White House loyalists form a protective circle around the President
like African buffalo threatened by a pride of lions. They are then said to be “in the bunker.” The Johnson White House, as the Viet Nam War
went bad, was in the bunker. So was the
Nixon White House during Watergate.

Yesterday, the newly appointed Press Spokesman, Sean Spicer,
met the White House Press Corps for the first time, barely more than
twenty-four hours after Donald Trump took the oath of office. Did he walk in smiling, greet those reporters
he knew by name, make a few jokes, lighten the mood, and generally do
everything he could to gain the best possible press for his boss and the new
Administration? Fat chance. He stalked in, read a prepared speech
accusing the people in front of him of lying, warned them that he would be
targeting them for attack, and stalked out.

David and DML give us wonderful descriptions of their experiences yesterday, one in DC, the other 3000 miles away in Seattle. Take the time to read them in the comments section of this blog. This could be big, folks. I am enormously encouraged by the endless repetition of the call to further action, both by Michael Moore and other speakers and by people in the marches. There is something extraordinarily appropriate that the focus of this march was the rights of women. Lord, let it be!

All of you will have seen the pictures and read the stories
of the extraordinary world-wide outpouring of opposition to Trump. There has never been anything remotely like
this in the history of the United States – not the Viet Nam era war protests,
not the Million Man March on Washington, not the inauguration of Barack Obama
[which was bigger in D. C. but not nation-wide.] I was there, and my aim in this post is to
give you a worms-eye view of the Washington March. I was just one old man wandering, like Pierre
at the Battle of Borodino, in and out of the crowds in one small area of the
event. I spent only about two hours at
the festivities, and I never was able to get close enough to the reviewing
stand to see or hear any of the speakers.
I leave it to television to tell you about that.

It began for me at 5:00 a.m. when I left for the
airport. RDU airport was not jammed, and
I easily made my way through security [because I am over 75 I can leave my
shoes on] and to the gate. As I sat
there, people gathered for the flight to DC.
Virtually all of those at the gate were women, many carrying rolled up
signs and a few wearing the signature bit of protest clothing – a red knitted
hat in the shape of a cat – a so-called pussy hat [and yes, the double entendre was intentional, as many
of the signs at the protest made clear.]
The flight was full, with maybe four men total, and I received pats of
approval from young women and grandmothers for my presence. I was asked whether this was my first
political action, and I allowed as how not quite, my first big protest having
been a Cuba Protest Rally at Harvard fifty-four years ago.

After breakfast at Washington National Airport, I made my way
to the Metro, expecting crowds. Not a
bit of it. There was no problem buying a
day pass, and the train was mostly empty.
“Hmm,” I thought, “maybe the predictions have been a bit overblown.” Two stops later, masses of people got on, and
pretty soon, the train was so jammed that people were sitting on the laps of
strangers. One lady carrying crutches
declined the offer of my seat because she was so jammed in that she could not
move the five feet to accept.

When we got to Federal Center SW, the closest stop to the
rallying point of the march, the train slowed but did not stop. The platform at the station was so jammed
with people on their way to the march that it looked as though you had to make
a reservation to go up the escalator. At
the next stop, Capitol South, we were allowed off the train, and surged toward the
escalator.

I followed the crowd from the Metro in the direction of
Independence and 3rd St. SW, trying to reach ground zero. When I got up to C Street, which runs east-west
a block south of the Mall, I turned and looked to my right. C Street rises gently as it goes east, and as
far as I could see, perhaps a mile or more, the street was completely filled
with people all walking west toward the protest site. They moved slowly, like a great river, fed by
tributaries right and left. Where were
they coming from? I had no idea, but it
occurred to me that these might be the folks who had arrived by bus, since the
parking place for the buses was RFK Stadium, about two miles due east of the
Capitol. Permits had been granted for
1800 buses, I read. At 50 people a bus,
that would be 90,000 marchers.

I walked alongside the marchers, who were joined at every
street corner by more people coming from the Metro stations, or maybe just on foot. The crowd was mostly women, but with a pretty
good sprinkling of men – some young with their partners, some older with their daughters
and wives, a few old like me. The crowd
was a sea of pink knitted caps. People
carried hand-made signs and printed signs, some calling on Trump to keep his
tiny hands off their pussies. One tall,
slender blonde young woman dressed in a diaphanous white gown, with a white scarf
tied around her eyes like a blindfold, stood on a marble stanchion and posed as
Justice [no scales, alas], while people took her picture. Long lines had formed at each of the Porta-toilets,
and the event even sported the inevitable doomsayer with big sign and portable
speaker calling on all present to repent.
Every now and then, a spontaneous high-pitched shout would start and
roll back along the march up C Street.
The atmosphere was festive, casual, cheerful, despite the message of the
signs, which was militant in the extreme.

As the C Street marchers moved steadily, relentlessly forward,
they encountered a blockade at 3rd Street SW. As best I could tell, that was the back of
the reviewing stand, on the other side of which the BIG NAMES were
speaking. “Where on earth are they going
to go?” I wondered, with tens of thousands coming behind them. Then I saw that as each line of marchers
reached the barricade, it split right and left and fed around it, presumably to
reassemble in the Mall and on Independence Avenue.

I was too timid to thrust myself into the line of march and
make my way to the other side, so I simply stood on the sidewalk and
watched. One young woman wearing a bright
red wig, suddenly started squealing with excitement and waving her arms wildly. When I asked her what had happened, she said,
in a kind of ecstasy, “I just saw Cher!”
After a long while, I started back to the Metro station for the trip to
the airport, and when I walked another block south, I discovered that tens of
thousands of other folks were there as well, walking west. The entire even was not so much a gathering
or a march as a migration, as if all of Washington D. C. had decided to be pick
up stakes and move to a new city.

All day, I had been calling my wife, my sister [who lives in
DC] and my sons to reassure them that I was all right, but of course there was
nothing to worry about. It was the most peaceful
gathering possible.

When I got home, I turned on the television and only then
learned of the size of the worldwide demonstrations. As I listened to commentators talk about the
Washington march, the New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, LA, Paris and London marches,
a small voice inside me said, very quietly, “I was there.”

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.